David Pogue: 10 Years on the Tech Beat — State of the Art – NYTimes.com

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Some concepts’ time may never come. The same “breakthrough” ideas keep surfacing — and bombing, year after year.

For the love of Mike, people, nobody wants videophones! When we’re on the phone, we don’t want to have to be presentable. We want to put away dishes, roll our eyes at other people in the room, pick our noses. Sure, when we want to see the new baby, we’ll use Skype or FaceTime. But not for everyday calls. If you try to sell us a special phone that has a camera and screen, you will fail.

Teenagers do not want “communicators” that do nothing but send text messages, either (AT&T Ogo, Sony Mylo, Motorola V200). People do not want to surf the Internet on their TV screens (WebTV, AOLTV, Google TV).